Over a year after MU administrators made the abrupt announcement that they would shut down one of the university’s most successful small programs (without consulting its faculty) and then backpedaled, the problem has not been solved or even publicly addressed by university administrators, and an internationally renowned program unfairly remains in total limbo.
On March 12, 2012, the university announced it would shut down the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute in three days. There was no warning to the faculty and students of the NSEI, as outgoing Graduate Dean George Justice had ordered, in now-public emails, to keep a “tight lid” on the decision to close. In terminating the institute, which is independent of the academic colleges, administrators broke section 320.150 of the Collected Rules and Regulations, which requires faculty consultation before the chancellor and Board of Curators decide to discontinue a program or department.
After the kind of uproar that tends to come when you break university rules, Provost Brian Foster announced on April 9, 2012, that MU would ensure the institute stayed open until all the NSEI students admitted for Fall 2012 have graduated, and that MU administrators would work with faculty to determine the best future for nuclear sciences and engineering at MU.
It’s now April 2013, and the four tenure-track faculty and 49 graduate students of the NSEI still have no clue about the future of their program. The hypocrisy is that the closing of the institute was intended to be the first step in expanding and strengthening MU’s nuclear resources; however, no action has been taken by the administration in a year, and the accomplished professors of the NSEI that would seemingly be at the center of this restructuring have been treated very poorly.
During the yearlong administrative silence on the future of the NSEI, prospective students have continued to apply (presumably because they see the worth of a degree from what the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2008 named the No. 1 nuclear program for scholarly productivity in the country) and the faculty has been unable to accept them. The four professors of NSEI, who together have built a very successful program, are forced to face a July 1, 2014, deadline for finding a new position at the university. And the research grants NSEI depends on to retain its faculty and advance the science continue to be jeopardized by administrators’s tepid way forward.
Yesterday, the Faculty Council voted 14-8 to approve one resolution regarding NSEI and MU administrators’ actions, in which the council would call upon Chancellor Brady Deaton to audit the NSEI (to determine the best path forward), and in the interim the program be restored to its former status.
The council decided to postpone voting on a resolution ordering an analysis of the decision process, to determine whether the administration properly followed university regulations.
Clearly, the vast majority of Faculty Council members are skeptical that MU administrators acted in the best interest of the university, its faculty and its students. Deaton and Foster must not procrastinate in their response. At a fall 2012 workshop with Faculty Council on “shared governance,” Deaton pledged to prioritize trust, transparency and timeliness. NSEI has yet to experience the successful execution of these priorities.